DISCLOSURE: This is sponsored content brought to you by Audio Design Desk.
We’ve all been there: you’re editing a brilliant sequence. In your mind, you can hear exactly how the scene should sound. The only problem is, after trolling around for hours for the right hits, risers, sound effects, and music cues across hard drives or online subscription libraries, you just can’t seem to find the right stuff.
And after hours of work, there's no way to update those placeholder sounds or dial in a mix within any reasonable amount of time.
So you sacrifice your sleep, your hourly rate, or get stuck with what you’ve got.
Enter Audio Design Desk, a hyper-intuitive tool designed for video editors, by video editors.
It will streamline your sonic workflow and help you edit the sound your film deserves—in a fraction of the time!
What is Audio Design Desk?
Audio Design Desk is an all-in-one audio solution that, for the first time, combines the two elements most desperately needed by video editors: a royalty-free sound market and seriously powerful audio editing software.
You bring in your footage, and with the help of intuitive software that basically reads your mind, a massive library, and a few hotkeys, Audio Design Desk helps you add sound (effects, design, music) that’s perfect for the story.
And until July 30, No Film School readers can get Audio Design Desk for 50% off! (Use coupon code: ADDNFS.)
Here’s how it works at a glance.
Reads your mind, then adds cues
Okay, there isn’t a direct neural link, but Audio Design Desk has the next best thing: an expertly tagged library that you can trigger with one click.
Say you’re editing a Kung Fu project with an epic sword-fight scene. First, you need the sounds of the blades clashing. You press one hotkey on your QWERTY keyboard to trigger a cue for each moment the blade sound is needed—in real-time, as you watch the scene.
Then, Audio Design Desk populates the sequence with sound at those exact moments. If you change your mind and want them to sound like different kinds of blades, one keystroke will change them all, no nudging or trimming required!
Next up, footsteps. Once a tedious process, you now watch and press a hotkey every time a footstep is needed. Wait, want those footsteps to sound barefoot? That takes one keystroke to change. Sneaker on gravel? One keystroke. Change to high heels? Another single keystroke. You can place all your footsteps in three minutes instead of three hours.
Audio Design Desk will always make them right, never repeating the same sound effect in a row. It’s as close to "reading your mind" as it gets.
Filmmaker-customizable 30,000-sound library
Audio Design Desk comes with over 30,000 sounds pre-organized into easy-to-understand sound types, like "footstep" or "gunshot" or "bass line." And within each type are nifty subtypes that get more specific, like "sneaker concrete," or "9mm handgun," or "rap." Everything can be pulled up instantly.
And if you'd like to narrow the pool of cues, click a genre or try different composers or albums.
What if you have your own foley, effects, or cues? No problem! Using the ultra-smart Audio Design Desk system, simply drag sounds in, click "guess metadata," and then poof, all your sounds are organized!
Sound editing that lets you seamlessly “Replace”
It’s one of the most agonizing aspects of sound editing: having to re-import, re-cut, and nudge sound cues as you experiment.
Finding the right effect or music cue is hard enough, especially if you’re slogging through an online library, downloading files, searching for them on your hard drive, lining them up in your timeline, and then hoping that the cue will actually work.
If it’s not quite right, you start all over again.
Audio Design Desk re-imagines the whole process.
When you pull up a cue from Audio Design Desk, and if you decide it’s not right, simply hit “Replace,” and with one click, it intuitively syncs up the replacements to exactly the right frame. You can change genre, mood, feel, intensity or complexity with one click.
Software that makes you a composer
With Audio Design Desk, you can turn your keyboard into a legit composing tool.
Maybe you want to create your own music cue that’s part music, part design. Or maybe you just want to skip the temp tracks and give something more solid to hand off to your composer.
Inside Audio Design Desk, you can actually bring up and manipulate musical elements by instrument, genre, tempo, and style, making music as you go.
Designed by video editors, for video editors
Gabriel Cowan, the CEO of Audio Design Desk, is not only an award-winning filmmaker, but a multi-platinum recording artist to boot. He actually became a filmmaker after scoring a Roger Corman movie!
A few years back, Cowan was editing a trailer and got fed up with the difficulty of bringing a basic dramatic riser into ProTools. He decided it was not ProTools' fault, it was just the wrong tool. And in fact, no one had created the right tool. So he decided to build one himself!
He drew a schematic and called up Sam Music, who made sounds for Spider-Man, Rogue One, and World War Z, and Ryan Francesconi, a musician-producer-programmer who helped build the underpinnings of YouTube and Apple TV. From there, Audio Design Desk was born.
Best of all? The team listens to user feedback to constantly adapt and attune Audio Design Desk to video editors.
Key features at a glance:
- Pro audio software built by video editors
- Real-time sound design tools
- Over 30,000 royalty-free sounds and music cues
- Assign sound types to QWERTY keyboard
- Over 10x faster at finding and placing sound cues than any other program
- Intelligent importer to bring in your own sounds
- Quick mixing hotkeys
- XML and AAF export to Avid, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, and more
Since it launched last summer, Audio Design Desk has racked up a ton of awards, including the NAB Best of Show Award, SXSW Innovator, Macworld Editors Choice (4.5 out of 5), MusicTech Choice (9 out of 10), Mix Magazine Top 20 Audio Products of the Year, and Tech Ascention’s Best Audio Software of the Year, to name only a few.
What filmmakers are saying about Audio Design Desk:
From DIY indies to shows on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBOMax, and more, editors are already thrilled with this new tool. Here is some of their feedback:
- “There isn't another piece of software that allows you to instantly create at this level of professionalism.” Academy Award-nominated editor Matthew Cooke
- “Audio Design Desk sets the new standard from which all other creative software will be measured.” Seth Clark, lead editor on Arrested Development and Mixed•ish
- “This is the tool I’ve been looking for my entire career." Jamie Hardt, sound effects editor (IT, Zero Dark Thirty)
- “Expertly designed," “A groundbreaking application that significantly speeds up the act of accurately adding sound effects and music to picture.” Mix Magazine
- “A breathtakingly effective idea for sound designers." Redshark News
- “A new paradigm for audio post-production." ProAudioFiles
Don't you wish you could create exceptional sound for your videos, and in a fraction of the time?
Here’s a 50% off coupon code just for No Film School readers that ends July 30:ADDNFS
Download a 30-day demo risk-free to try this groundbreaking software for yourself!
